How is Mrs Ramsay thinking? The semantic effects of consciousness presentation categories within free indirect style

Abstract

The stylistic categories available for presenting consciousness have important semantic implications for the interpretation of fictional minds in narratives. Free indirect style, the broadest and most stylistically problematic of those categories, is particularly important because of the exceptional degree to which it grants readers access to characters’ mental experience. However, recent work in cognitive narratology (e.g. Herman, 2011a, 2011b; Palmer, 2004, 2011; Zunshine, 2006) has de-prioritized the category approach to consciousness presentation, and with it free indirect style, by adopting a cognitive science-based methodology that is less grounded in linguistic analysis. In this article I argue that a departure from consciousness presentation categories is not advantageous to the progression of narratological scholarship, and that a continued focus on the linguistic constructs that individuate the categories should be integrated with developments in the cognitive approach. This is because different categories and sub-categories have different semantic effects in terms of the extent to which they express verbal or non-verbal mental activity, as well as the aspects of consciousness that they evoke. The broad category of free indirect style in particular has a distinct semantic effect in relation to other techniques: it brings about what is best described as a representational relationship between the narrative discourse and the fictional consciousness. In order to substantiate these claims, I analyse a passage from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), in which frequent shifts between and manipulations of consciousness presentation categories provide a context for elucidating their semantic implications.